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Nucleus Triptych

Larry Scully

1922 – 2002

Artwork Details

Artist          Larry Scully 
Title            Nucleus Triptych
Year            1973
Medium      Oil on canvas (154 x 230cm)

About the Artist

Laurence Vincent ‘Larry’ Scully (1922–2002) was a South African artist born in Gibraltar and raised partly in Portsmouth, England, before his family moved to South Africa. He studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1947 to 1950. Scully taught at Polly Street Art Centre and Pretoria Boys High School. Subsequently, he became a Professor of Fine Arts and Art History at Stellenbosch University. He represented South Africa at the Venice and São Paulo biennales and spent his later years in Stellenbosch.

About this Artwork

Nucleus Triptych reflects Scully's engagement with abstraction as a means of exploring universal themes of energy, creation and interconnectedness. Structured around a powerful central circular form (nucleus) that radiates across three panels, the work suggests a source of life or creative force from which movement and growth emerge. Throughout his career, Scully employed recurring motifs such as circles, seeds and cosmic forms as metaphors for natural and spiritual processes, moving beyond representation to investigate the unseen forces that connect humanity, nature and the wider universe. The triptych format reinforces these ideas, creating a sense of expansion and continuity that extends beyond the boundaries of the canvas, while exemplifying Scully's belief that abstraction could communicate both physical and metaphysical realities.